Tim Bray On the Future of the Web

snitch writes "In a recent interview at QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking. Bray also addresses the way web technologies are affected by the current economic turmoil and gives his insight into which paradigms he sees going forward in these challenging times."

Comments

I think he has some good points.

[rackserverdeals]

What he says about RIA might be controversial but there is some validity to what he says. There is a lot to be said for simplicity of interface and richness of content. That has been the hallmark of most great websites.

That's not to say user interfaces couldn't be improved on the web through technologies such as AJAX, but I feel it should be used more as a condiment rather than the main course.

I remember back in the 90's people kept saying "push" technologies will be the next big thing but that didn't seem to be the case.

By the way, there was a cool presentation of the Sun Cloud at CommunityOne last week. It's pretty neat. I think that cloud computing should still abstract scaling from the user, but that may never happen or will take a lot longer to implement.

Right now it's just like drawing a network diagram in Visio, except the symbols in your drawing represent actual virtual servers in the Sun Cloud. It's pretty neat. It will be interesting to see what the pricing will be like. They say they are planning on being price competitive with other platforms, which should mean it should be similar with Amazon's EC2???

Re:I think he has some good points.

[__aasqbs9791]

I'm glad you posted that link, there are some interesting things in the second chapter.

I had lunch with Tim Bray at RailsConf 2007 one day by chance and he's one of the more personable geeks I've had that chance to meet. He has some interesting ideas, and I think he has a good grasp on the way things are likely to actually pan out in the next few years.

Re:I think he has some good points.

[pallmall1]

What he says about RIA might be controversial but there is some validity to what he says. There is a lot to be said for simplicity of interface and richness of content.

The marketing types are trying to push RIA to the masses, and it doesn't always fit there. It can lead to a lot of bloat and complexity for the user (the web page with the interview is evidence of that). I think the real place for RIA is in the niche market, where specialized information can be processed presented in a less complicated way than on a flat page. In other words, rich internet applications are for applications, and can be overdone when treated as toys.

Re:I think he has some good points.

[bonch]

The thing that bugs me about the new web application push is that we spent 30 years creating operating systems with standard application APIs, and now everyone is trying to throw that work out and start totally from scratch for every website. It's an odd idea to run an operating system to run a application to run an application.

Re:REST vs WS-* = WTF

[rackserverdeals]

Not knowing what either of these is, I to2ly phear ur 733t no77idg3z of teh codez.

Not caring what either of these is, I p155 on ur ri10 skillz.

If you don't know what those things are, maybe reading stories on developers.slashdot.org is not for you.

Let me Google that for you

[tepples]

Google qcon sf leads me to this web site, which states that the conference happened in the third week of November 2008.

article is an example of what can go wrong

[bcrowell]

The article itself is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you use javascript, etc., inappropriately. They make you look at the article through a keyhole, and you can't make the keyhole bigger. The answers are also hidden behind these little plus-sign icons, which you have to click on. Hmm...so much for access for people with disabilities. Here's the full text in -- ahem -- html.

***

Hi my name is Dionysios Synodinos and we are here at QCon San Francisco with Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems, to talk about the Future of the Web. Mister Bray with all the buzz about Rich Internet Applications there are many that believe that the future of the Web is synonymous to RIA technologies. What do you think of the RIA notion in general?

So when people talk about Rich Internet Applications unfortunately what they seem to usually mean is like Flash. Things that respond to key strokes and wiggle and morph and have video and move around, and they say that we need these things because the web needs to be more responsive, and more immersive and more reactive, and I am generally speaking massively unconvinced. I am old enough to remember before the web when everybody spent all day every day dealing with reactive immersive response compelled applications usually written in Visual Basic or Motif or something like that and mostly really bad. Because designing user interfaces is a hard thing and most of them aren't done well and most of them are bad.

When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with. Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive".

Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic ... ". On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world's most popular actual real Internet applications you'll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them So I tend to be highly cynical about this whole subject.

To the extend that web applications need to become richer, do you think Ajax is the horse to bet on? Also do you think that web browser is sufficiently interactive to facilitate highly engaging user experience?

Regarding the answer to the last question, the answer to this one will be fairly obvious. Yes, I mean Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I s

Thanks for the text

[QuincyDurant]

You really did prove Bray's point--that content often trumps form.

Re:Thanks for the text

[bcrowell]

You really did prove Bray's point--that content often trumps form.

It's actually kind of hilarious to go back and read the contents of what Bray said and compare it with the way they presented the interview on the web site. There's this, for instance:

I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with.

[Sites like Wikipedia] expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them

It really sounds like Bray saw how they presented the interview on their site, hopped in his time machine, went back in time for the interview, and explained to them exactly how not to present it -- and then they blithely ignored the content of what he was saying and did it the way he was telling them would suck. Either that or infoq.com has an extremely well developed sense of irony.

Re:the naughts

[raftpeople]

My feeling is that "Web 2.0" was a giant waste of time
I completely agree, the quicker we get to Web 3.0 the better.